Our project is more than just a public service and performance. It is, in fact, for us, a way of life itself. For us, this is also the new role of art in today’s 21st century world.

For in order to operate a free travelling library, we must, in fact, exist in symbiosis with the library itself.

We must live wherever our library is.

For three years we have moved continuously: existing and operating in eleven countries and twenty-one cities worldwide, providing a free public library service in over one hundred and fifty different locations. More than eight hundred and fifty citizens in these communities became members and accessed the library’s services.

Operating without the confines of a building of its own, but within parameters of typical library systems including free membership for all, circulation procedures, library regulation, and the overseeing of the library’s collection by a librarian in situ, our project fundamentally explores, and encourages users to explore, our perceptions of what a library might be.

Emphatically, our project is also about getting people to read poetry. Which they do. We’ve just signed up Valued Patron of the Library #877, here in Leipzig, East Germany. We arrived from San Francisco, via London & Amsterdam.

When people join the library they on the whole sit down and read some of the books we have out that day. The point of the project is, we can install a library anywhere, so we’re effectively reaching potential readers who would never 'go' to a library if it didn't happen to find them instead!

We set up in cafes, bookshops, theatres, parks, streets, your own home: you name it we've done it. Frankly, there's no greater pleasure for is, in what we do, than watching this happen: people thinking they've come to a cafe, then finding themselves in a library, then joining and sitting down and reading a poetry book!

Part of the project is also about subverting mainstream channels of distribution, so we collect & acquisition new items in each place we get to, then take them with us when we leave. Thus, we took a whole load of EU poetry over to the US, then when we recently arrived back in the EU we brought a load of US poetry back with us.

Some Statistics
Current worldwide membership: 879

The Top 5 Cities that got with the Library Programme!
San Francisco (California, USA) = 369
Portland (Oregon, USA) = 89
Leipzig (Germany) = 77
Seattle (Washington, USA) = 50
Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) = 55
Statistics up to date as of January 22 2008